Day 5

Well, Monday comes screaming round fast and another week begins, already much better than the last!

What a gorgeous weekend it turned into! After an indulgent craft-a-thon on Saturday (with lots of rest and naps for the heroic boy) we ventured out into the bright light on Sunday and had an absolutely lovely day in the sunshine. We planned wedding bits, went wandering around Bristol (a FAB place to be in the sunshine) sat on the grass by the iconic suspension bridge and set the world to rights for hours. It was so lovely to shoot the breeze after the week we've had and nice to think about the future. I love to talk to MH. He is my sounding board for everything but it was nice to talk about something other than hospital visits and test results and if, buts and maybes. Not that we avoided the topic, but it certainly wasn't lurkng like a black cloud on a sunny day.

If you have been through or are going through something like this, I cannot enforce enough the value of having someone (or something, like a blog) to talk stuff at. Half the time, we're not stupid and know our bodies well enough to know how serious or not a situation is. Talking at people helps me set my mind, asses the situation for what it is and formulate a standard emotional response/ level I can live with, and expect others to live with, for everyday... survival I guess. I consider myself exceptionally lucky in that I have MH but I never want to be complacent of that. He has his own emotions to deal with in amongst all this and it would be selfish of me to over run that with mine all the time. Considering his feelings in all of this helps me to stay grounded and SANE which is important.

But this blog is in existence so that I can rationalise things outside that sphere and also in the vain hope that someone going through something similar might read it and take some form of comfort or reassurance from it.

But today is hard. I know it may sound naive but I never quite realised how much daily life revolves around food. And I never realised how much I enjoy food. How much I love food. Mmm. Fooooood.

Its another one of those things that is making me feel a lot less than normal. Work is, weirdly, the hardest. I never realised how much my day was divided up by and apportioned to food. Over the weekend I can honestly say only twice did I really feel sad and almost distressed about not being able to eat. Mind you, I've not told many people about the liquid diet so it is kinda my fault! I am sure, had he known, our dear neighbour, J, would not have, when describing his new house and its surrounding are, have spent 5 minutes eulogising a pork belly sandwich that can be purchased from his new local deli. No joke, his words actually caused me to whimper and audibly to such a level that he stopped talking as he thought there was something wrong. And there was; I had just fallen a tiny bit in love with a bread based snack!

I do wander what my reluctance is in telling people that I have not gone on an extreme weight loss program before the wedding but am tending to my mutant gut in preparation for a major operation. And I think it comes back to what I wrote about earlier. It makes me not normal. As my work mates sit at their desks and tuck into BLT's, piping hot pasta and pot noodles, I am hunkered behind my screen and 'eating' what can only be thought of as the love child of lemon curd and Slimer.

I hope that it gets better from here-on in. I'll keep you posted.